By WILLIAM ARNOLD, P-I MOVIE CRITIC

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, March 13, 2008

One thing you can say about Michael Haneke's unbelievably brutal thriller, "Funny Games," is that it's an experience: an unpleasant, unsettling, cruelly manipulative and finally hateful experience, but an experience nonetheless. You'll likely lose some sleep over this one.

The film is actually an Americanized remake by the German-born French director ("Cache") of his 1997 film of the same name, with several of the original cast members back in small parts and a script so close to the original that it's almost a shot-by-shot carbon copy.

It's also a movie that's impossible to review without giving its plot away so if you must see it (which I don't recommend) stop reading here. All you really need to know going in is that it's a movie about a nice family being horrendously tortured for nearly two hours.

The family is the beautiful Ann (Naomi Watts), her somewhat timid husband, George, (Tim Roth) and their preteen son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), who we meet as they're on vacation, driving to their expensive summer home on an idyllic lake somewhere in Middle America.

But no sooner do they get there than the place is invaded by a pair of clean-cut young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) who look like Hitler Youths, wear immaculate white gloves, ask to borrow some eggs and claim to be guests of the neighbors.

Well, they're not guests of the neighbors. They're serial killers on a spree, and for the next 100 minutes or so we get to see them bind, beat, kick, stab and psychologically torment the family with the sadistic (but not especially imaginative) mind games of the title.

They kill the family dog. They make the mother strip and humiliate her before her son. First, they nearly smother the boy, and finally they murder him. Then they murder everyone else. Then they get away. That's the movie.

None of this, incidentally, is presented with any suspense or horror-movie embellishments: it's not "Saw IV." It's shot in a slow-paced, art-house style. Scenes of the characters' sufferings are mostly presented in static master shots that seem to play forever.

Like Tarantino in his most pandering torture scenes, the director is inviting us to join the villains, take their point of view, connect with our own worst instincts and enjoy the act of inflicting unspeakable violence and verbal abuse on people who cannot escape.

But at the end of the final act, Haneke tips his hand in another direction. He winks at the audience to let it know that what he's really doing is showing us how other moviemakers exploit violence. How weak and gullible we are, how we allow ourselves to be seduced by them.

Like several of his earlier films, this one is actually, slyly, anti-violence.

Yeah, right.

He's like the religious-minded procurer in a W. Somerset Maugham story who takes a sailor through a night of debauchery to exhaust his lust so he can accept God. It's very high-minded of him, but, like the sailor, we've been dehumanized by the process and, like the pimp, he takes our money home.